erebion

“read the changes before installing a major update”

As if people have the time to read the changelogs for every single package all the time… 🙄

This is pretty important on a server to avoid disruptions and outages, but people have other things to do.

And once it is no longer on and has become a setting, they can just remove the setting and force people to drop gsettings and then remove it completely.

They could also instead ask people on first launch. Some people enable telemetry, so they will find out how many people prefer to keep it, which I bet will be most.

Then that could be solved by displaying a message the first time GNOME is launched, not by disabling it. This will just break workflows for quite a lot of people.

XMPP server, do some decentralised communication under your control. It will federate to other servers, allowing you to speak to other people and join public chats. An old Raspberry Pi should easily be able to server 100 or 200 users. Try Prosody for that or Snikket if you prefer containers and everything working out of the box.

You could also use it as a NAS, if you don’t need a fast NAS. It will probably be enough to stream HD media using VLC on a cheap Android TV device/dongle.

But why? Then the users thinks “huh, weird” and goes on.

I’ve seen that countless times with people that are less technical.